Many service providers, such as auto garage owners, wish to be continuously informed of the condition of their customers' vehicles, in order to be able to offer them the right service at the right time; a service the customers might not even know they need. Some vehicle owners would like to be informed of the condition of their vehicle for different reasons like the “do it yourself” person or to better negotiate the cost of repair. To learn about the health of vehicles, solutions known in the art connect to the vehicle networks where relevant data is exchanged between the computers that control the vehicle. Connections to a vehicle's systems often take advantage of the standardization of an On Board Diagnostics (OBD) port to connect to vehicle networks. The solutions known in the art that collect this data onto local memory and include processing computing powers are often expensive, same as those that choose to transfer the data via long range wireless connection such as cellular. Other solutions communicate the data for processing in a different way, lowering the cost of the interface, some transferring the data collected via a wired connection such as USB and some via short range connection such as BLUETOOTH or ZIGBEE.
The OBD is an automotive term referring to a vehicle's self-diagnostic and reporting capability. OBD systems give the vehicle owner or repair technician access to the error codes initiated by the various vehicle sub-systems. Modern OBD implementations use a standardized digital communications socket to provide access to real-time data on vehicle control network in addition to a standardized series of diagnostic trouble codes (DTCs), which allow one to rapidly identify malfunctions within the vehicle. Use of a short range radio to transfer data collected is often not energy efficient because of the constant power this radio consumes even when no data is transferred. In general BLUETOOTH implementations are set to operate in a listening mode in order to avoid radio transmissions that can be taxing on the limited energy available to battery powered devices like a vehicle that is not running or a mobile communication device. While in this state, an implementation can allow the device to be discoverable. In discoverable mode the device will respond to a request to connect that comes from a device it was paired with before. Hence, most commonly one device has to enter a transmission mode in order to initiate a connection process by issuing an inquiry to explore what other BLUETOOTH radios are in its vicinity. However in the absence of an event to trigger such switch to transmission mode, one device must be all the time in transmission mode consuming energy for constant transmissions. BLUETOOTH protocol profiles can help mitigate some of these issues. Profiles are definitions of settings to parameterize and to control the communication from the start based on specific applications. An example of such profile might be a headphone profile or the HID (Human Interface Device) profile, both not data exchange profiles but allow a mobile communication device to have a limited ongoing search for such devices. The first connection with one of these special profiles prevents another connection with the same profile. In the example of a vehicle the desired use of headphone profile is to connect to a hands free talking system whenever the phone is brought on board the vehicle. To preserve energy, headset equipment in vehicles is designed to be powered up when the ignition switch is turned indicating a possible presence of a driver with a mobile communication device in the vehicle and a following ignition indicating power will be provided by the engine. This event causes the headset equipment to initiates a discovery process that will result in an automatic connection to a pre-paired smart phone if the driver carries one. Otherwise, the discovery process will fail to form a connection and no further attempt will be made until the ignition switch is turned on again. There is no such “automatic” connection scheme for data in the art. Devices that are designed to receive their power from standard connections like the OBD port receive power constantly preventing them to use power presence as an indicator of ignition. Devices should not interfere with normal operations of the vehicle they are brought onto like in the headset system example.
Even after connection was made, the transmission bandwidth can be energy consuming pending the amount of data transmitted and received. The art to date teaches a few interface protocols to handle the data that might be found on vehicle networks like ELM 327 or J2534. The interface protocols provide a level of abstraction for the lower level signals they read. Implementations of these protocols most often result in significant bandwidth created by the volume of these abstracted commands needed to extract meaningful information. Vehicle control networks generate large amounts of data that make transmitting it over wireless networks at lower bandwidth and lower cost even more challenging. The OBD port gives access to the multiple control networks of a vehicle. Obviously, use of a wireless communications channel introduces more possibilities of unauthorized access. In the event of a BLUETOOTH protocol, pairing is the basic form of protection known in the art. Because of the significant harm possible in applications like automotive, this defense might not be considered as sufficient protection.